Calque-free lectures? Spanish cross-linguistic influence in content teaching through English
In the last ten years, Spanish universities have gradually started to incorporate English as a means of instruction. As a result, many lecturers —who regularly use their mother tongue for their teaching activity— have been compelled to adapt their syllabus contents into English, resulting in lecture...
| Autores: | , |
|---|---|
| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2010 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Sevilla (US) |
| Repositorio: | idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:idus.us.es:11441/34250 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/11441/34250 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Tertiary education CLIL Cross-linguistic influence Source language interference Calque Educación Superior Influencia cros-lingüística Interferencia de la L1 Calco |
| Sumario: | In the last ten years, Spanish universities have gradually started to incorporate English as a means of instruction. As a result, many lecturers —who regularly use their mother tongue for their teaching activity— have been compelled to adapt their syllabus contents into English, resulting in lectures that show evidence of cross-linguistic influence (Odlin, 1989). This is especially noticeable in the recurrent presence of calques, which emerge as a consequence of both the teachers’ insufficient proficiency in the foreign language and a lack of expertise in lecturing through a non-native medium of spoken communication. The goal of this paper is precisely to evaluate the extent to which this interference is made visible. To this aim, a corpus of three Engineering lectures delivered in English has been used as a means of exemplification, with results that prove the presence of syntactic, lexical and morphological calques in all cases. The ultimate end of this research is not only to raise teachers’ awareness of their own dependency on L1 as their main language resource, but also to eventually provide them with tools and strategies which might enhance their performance, hence improving teacher-student communication. |
|---|